Early African American History in Colorado

Early History - Political Leaders

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In 1867 Congress, heeding a petition signed by 137 of the roughly 150 African Americans living in Colorado, insisted that the Territory guarantee voting rights to Black men as a condition of statehood. This was the opening salvo in an ongoing battle for civil rights in Colorado, one that African Americans fought on many fronts over many decades.

African American business and political leaders in Denver successfully opposed Colorado statehood until lawmakers wrote a constitution that removed color as a barrier to suffrage. Their activism helped persuade Congress to grant voting rights to Black men living in Colorado and other western territories in 1867--three years before ratification of the 15th Amendment granted the same rights to Black males in the states.

It flared anew in the 1890s, when Five Points resident Joseph Stuart - the first African American elected to the state legislature - sponsored a bill designed to end housing discrimination and other forms of racial intolerance. The measure passed, but segregation continued - indeed worsened, despite the efforts of political organizations such as the Denver chapter of the NAACP (formed in 1915). In the 1920s, politicians allied with the Ku Klux Klan gained control of the state government - an indication of how deep Colorado's racial divisions ran.

William Jefferson Hardin was born in Kentucky to a previously enslaved woman and a white father in 1831. In 1863 he came to the Colorado Territory, because all men over 21 in the territories had the right to vote. But the following year, the law was amended to exclude Black men. Hardin spoke eloquently on behalf of Black suffrage, and Congress gave African American men in all U.S. territories the vote in 1867. A Republican, Hardin was an at-large delegate to the national convention in 1872.

Joseph Stuart

Born in 1855, Joseph Stuart practiced law in Denver for most of his life. He was active in the Five Points community, admitted to the Colorado Bar in 1891, and became one of the first African Americans elected to the Colorado General Assembly’s House of Representatives in 1894. He was also active in the women’s suffrage movement (women won the right to vote in 1893).

Barney Ford Entrepreneur Barney Lancelot Ford presided over the chambers of the House of Representatives. A prominent businessman, Ford opposed statehood for Colorado until African-Americans received the right to vote. Activism by Ford and like-minded Colorado Black people led to the passage of the Territorial Suffrage Act of 1868, a Congressional measure that guaranteed voting rights for African American men in the territories three years before ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. Ford ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature in 1872. But he nevertheless was the first African-American to serve on a Colorado grand jury. Ford died in 1902.